I have recently been rereading Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion, and I’ve found an argument of his that, in my opinion, nicely illustrates the divide between theistic thought and atheistic thought. Here is is, from the end of chapter 3:

There is a much more powerful argument, which does not depend upon subjective judgement, and it is the argument from improbability. It really does transport us dramatically away from 50 per cent agnosticism, far towards the extreme of theism in the view of many theists, far towards the extreme of atheism in my view. I have alluded to it several times already. The whole argument turns on the familiar question ‘Who made God?’, which most thinking people discover for themselves. A designer God cannot be used to explain organized complexity because any God capable of designing anything would have to be complex enough to demand the same kind of explanation in his own right. God presents an infinite regress from which he cannot help us to escape. This argument, as I shall show in the next chapter, demonstrates that God, though not technically disprovable, is very very improbable indeed.

Dawkins’s question here is: if life, the universe, and everything could not exist without a creator, then how can their creator exist without an even greater creator? After all, if order and complexity cannot exist on their own, then how did our universe’s creator (who must be orderly and complex in order to design such a universe) come into existence? In my opinion, it’s a good question, but a theist might see it as missing the point. I shall explain with an analogy.

You are examining a crime scene, and you discover a small hole. You examine it closely, and you conclude that it is a bullet hole. If it is, then you can strongly conclude that a gun fired that bullet, and someone pulled the trigger on that gun. Now, this conclusion actually raises more questions: What kind of gun was it? Who made the gun? Who fired that gun? Why did they fire it? Where did the shooter come from? Where did the gun maker come from? And so on. But even if we never get an answer to any of these questions, we can still conclude that a human fired a gun, because we have the bullet hole, and there’s only one way to make such a hole.

The theist position is that our existence is like that bullet hole, and the creator is the one who fired the bullet. Questions like “Where did the creator come from?” are interesting, but even if we never get an answer to such questions, we still know that there is a creator responsible for our universe. Ignorance in one area does not refute knowledge in another area. (For another example, consider abiogenesis and evolution: even if we know nothing about how life got started, we can still know that life evolved)

This is not to say that theists do not try to answer questions about the creator. Indeed, most of them are quite preoccupied with the question of the creator’s motives. Consider Rick Falkenstein, who became a creationist last month. After concluding that something created us, he asserted that created things have a purpose and set out to find that purpose, rather like a crime scene investigator trying to figure out a shooter’s motive. Both of these are smart choices, if we grant their initial assumptions. Wouldn’t it be good to know why our creator made the world, just as it is good to know why someone made a shot? Of course, even if we never get answers to these questions, that doesn’t change the conditions that prompted us to ask the questions in the first place. The bullet hole is still there.

But what if the hole was not a bullet hole?

Fake bullet holes are available for purchase. Holes that look like bullet holes can fool the untrained eye, just as this hole did (and this hole as well). Forensics textbooks insist that it takes “training and experience” to properly distinguish bullet holes from similar marks. With that in mind, it’s not hard to imagine an unskilled investigator trying to determine the motives of a shooter that never existed as they examine a hole that wasn’t actually made by a bullet.

Now go back to the subject of creation, and you can see the point I’m trying to make: our reality looks like it was created, until you examine it more closely. Creationists have made many arguments, some of them quite sophisticated, and scientists have refuted them all. The design that Falkenstein sees is simply not sufficient to prove the existence of a designer. No bullet hole, no bullet, no gun, no shooter. It’s that simple.

Millions of people have looked at life, at the earth, and at the stars, and have concluded that someone must made all this. Some being, however strange, must have laid out the order we see. But our instincts fool us; great minds have sought that being, and have not found it, bringing back only evidence of order arising by itself. Many have desperately tried to prove a creator’s existence in the face of this evidence, but sound minds have rejected their offerings. It appears that our tendency to see a creator’s handiwork is simply part of our tendency to see patterns that aren’t there. Bullet holes, man… they’re everywhere.

We really shouldn’t go on like this. Endlessly looking for things that aren’t there does us no good, whether we’re looking for gods or guns. If anyone can offer sound evidence of a great creator, then let them come forth and do so, but as it is now, when I look at life, the universe, and everything, the only bullet holes I see are the ones we’ve made ourselves.